Events have evolved tremendously over the past few years, and 2020 further accelerated the evolution. Whether you’re planning a multi-day, in-person conference, executing a hybrid summit, or hosting a fundraising event virtually, there are a lot of moving parts. Event content is king, but logistics are just as critical to ensure your event is a success. If you want to differentiate your event, you must find creative ways to attract, engage, and retain attendees. The first step to accomplishing all your event goals is finding ways to delegate elements (or all) of your event planning to an expert experiential marketing agency.
What is an Experiential Marketing Agency?
Before we dive in, let’s answer two important questions:
- What is experiential marketing?
- Why should you hire one of these organizations for your conference planning?
Experiential marketing is a strategy based on creating the best experience possible for your target audience. It abandons traditional, cookie cutter, and sales-y approaches to put your attendees at the center. Experiential marketing strives to create more of an emotional connection between the audience and brand, which in turn creates attendee loyalty for future events as well. A seasoned experiential marketing agency lays out a plan for your organization that’s the perfect balance between branding, technology, communication, staffing, content, and more.
How to Choose an Experiential Marketing Agency
Research is key to finding the best experiential marketing agency to support your organization. A good experiential marketing agency will be able to distinguish and personalize the experience for your audience. A convention in the banking industry will look very different from a nonprofit hybrid fundraiser, and you need an agency that has the skillset and experience to flawlessly execute both in unique ways. Here are the six key qualities to look for when researching experiential marketing agencies.
Return on Investment
During the research and consultation stages, it is critical to ask the various agencies how they measure ROI. The agency should be able to provide some tangible measures of success for past events to give you real-world examples of their capabilities. Make sure you sit down with your team ahead of time to discuss which factors are most important to evaluate success. This ensures you can align your internal strategy with the talents of the experiential marketing agency.
Years in the Game
You are hiring an experienced organization to ensure every angle of the planning process flawless, so bringing in an expert agency that’s time-tested and innovative is crucial. While it may not always be the case, years in business is a pretty good indication of quality. If clients didn’t feel that an organization was spectacular, it probably wouldn’t still be around!
Run of Show
Ask the agency how they would recommend structuring your event. This will give you a good feel for their creativity. Of course, an initial consultation won’t be too detailed, but understanding if they’ve run similar events in the past will make you feel much more comfortable about their event management skills.
Reputation
That third party endorsement is really everything. Everyone loves playing show and tell! Whenever you hire any type of company, you are taking a leap of faith. Learning about the agency’s reputation and relationships with past clients can put those fears at ease. During your discovery call, ask the agency for references or case studies that you can review after the call ends. No organization is perfect, but what others say about them gives you much better context than what the agency says about itself.
Connections and Causes
While interviewing a potential experiential event planning agency, ask them what means the most to them outside of event planning. Marketers by nature are storytellers, and their answers should help you decipher how dedicated and passionate they are about the work they do. Also ask about current partnerships. Are they well connected in the community to help you with driving attendance, securing strategic partners, or disseminating marketing messages?
Culture Compatibility
Last, but certainly no less important, is culture compatibility. Especially if you’re planning large scale events and conferences, team compatibility will be crucial in successful execution. While not necessarily 100% needed, it is helpful if you find an organization that works well with your current team and the type of event that you are hosting. Not only will this make collaboration more fun for both teams, but likely your event will be better because of shared vision and colleagueship. Personalities aside, compatibility also goes beyond just face-value. Similar expectation levels and technology knowledge that your team is already familiar with will help both teams work well and collaborate together.
Ready to hire an experiential marketing agency, but not sure where to start? To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. So, we recommend being prepared to ask:
How do you measure success?
What is your experience, and how many years have you been in business?
Can you please share a typical run of show for a _________ type of event?
Do you have references you can share with us?
What causes are important to you? What organizations are you a member of?
How does your corporate culture play into the services you provide?
Creating a successful event that builds awareness, fosters loyalty, drives revenue, and expands your organizations reach can feel like a nearly impossible feat. If you’re looking to bring on an experiential marketing agency, finding the right agency partner that emobodies these six characteristics is key!
